The courts have so far stopped Trump’s plans to end birthright citizenship, stop federal grants, and change the way federal agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau work.
According to ABC News, the administration suffered another setback over the weekend when a federal judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s large federal payment system. This system holds private data about millions of Americans.
Musk said the judge was dishonest and demanded that he be removed from office right away.
Vance has also spoken out against some judges whom he thinks are illegally interfering with the power of the Executive Branch.
“It would be against the law for a judge to tell a general how to run a military operation.” It would also be against the law for a judge to tell the attorney general how to use her own judgment as a prosecutor. “Judges can’t decide what the executive can and can’t do,” Vance told ABC over the weekend.
Sunday, Trump was asked about what Vance said and the bad things that happened to him in court.
“When a president can’t look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don’t have a country anymore,” Trump told the press. “So, we’re very upset, but not with the judges who made that decision. We still have a long way to go, though.
The president also said, “To be honest, no judge should be able to make that kind of decision.” “It’s a disgrace.”
Most Republicans agree that the president should be re-elected. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton called the judge who stopped DOGE from getting to Treasury data a “outlaw.” On CNN on Sunday, Rep. Jim Jordan, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, mostly defended Musk’s actions by saying that he was “carrying out the will” of the president who appointed him.
Axios reported that House Republicans are planning to bring impeachment articles against at least two federal judges who have stood in the way of Trump’s plans.
These actions are part of a public fight that is getting worse between Republicans and the federal judiciary. Trump is fighting back against things that are getting in the way of his “government efficiency” plan. “Maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation,” Trump said this week during a news briefing with DOGE head Musk in the Oval Office.
As confirmed by Clyde’s office, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) is writing articles of impeachment against U.S. District Court Judge John J. McConnell Jr., who is the chief judge of the District of Rhode Island and was appointed by President Obama and told the administration to lift the federal spending freeze.
In a post on X this week, Clyde said that McConnell was a “partisan activist using our courts as a weapon to stop President Trump’s funding freeze on wasteful and woke government spending.”
Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) has said he is going to file articles of impeachment against U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York, who also worked for Obama and stopped DOGE from getting to Treasury records for the same reason.
For Clyde and Crane to be found guilty, they would need two-thirds of the Senate to agree with them and a majority in the House to remove the two judges.
Axios said that getting the votes would be hard because there are only 53 Republicans in the Senate.
Impeachments of judges are very uncommon and usually happen for reasons like corruption, lying, or serious misconduct. The last federal court judge to be successfully impeached was in 2010 for giving false information about their finances, the news source said.
ABC News talked to constitutional law expert Michael Gerhardt at the University of North Carolina. He said that Trump’s words are mostly “bravado” because “judges are entitled to review the constitutionality of presidential actions.”
